Saturday, December 31, 2016

The Switcher Android Trojan uses infected Android devices to attack wireless routers by performing brute force attacks on the routers’ admin web interfaces. If the attacks succeed, Switcher hijacks the Domain Name Server (DNS) by changing the IP addresses of the DNS servers in the router settings and then reroutes all DNS queries to the attackers’ servers. As a result, Switcher is able to redirect all connected users to malicious IP addresses when they enter legitimate domain addresses, thereby exposing them to a broad range of attacks including phishing and malware infection.

There is currently no indication of Switcher infection in Singapore. However, Singapore users should nevertheless adopt the necessary preventive measures to avoid potential infection.

Thursday, November 3, 2016

IBM Platform Cluster Manager Community Edition has been released with no charge.

Platform Cluster Manager Community Edition is easy-to-use, powerful cluster management software for technical computing users. It delivers a comprehensive set of functions to help manage hardware and software from the infrastructure level. It automates the deployment of the operating system and software components, and complex activities, such as application cluster creation and maintenance of a system.

The community edition offering of Platform Cluster Manager Community Edition, uses a centralized user interface from where system administrators can manage a complex cluster as a single system. It offers the flexibility for users to add customized features that are based on specific requirements of their environment. It also provides a kit framework for easy software deployment. It also has the ability to set up enable a mutlitenant, multi-cluster environment.

Tuesday, October 25, 2016

Taken from RedHat (https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/2706661)

Background Information
A race condition was found in the way the Linux kernel's memory subsystem handled the copy-on-write (COW) breakage of private read-only memory mappings. An unprivileged local user could use this flaw to gain write access to otherwise read-only memory mappings and thus increase their privileges on the system.

This could be abused by an attacker to modify existing setuid files with instructions to elevate privileges. An exploit using this technique has been found in the wild. This flaw affects most modern Linux distributions.

Red Hat Product Security has rated this update as having a security impact of Important.

Attack Description and Impact:This flaw allows an attacker with a local system account to modify on-disk binaries, bypassing the standard permission mechanisms that would prevent modification without an appropriate permission set. This is achieved by racing the madvise(MADV_DONTNEED) system call while having the page of the executable mmapped in memory.

Take Action:All Red Hat customers running the affected versions of the kernel are strongly recommended to update the kernel as soon as patches are available. Details about impacted packages as well as recommended mitigation are noted below. A system reboot is required in order for the kernel update to be applied.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Leap seconds are a periodic one-second adjustment of Coordinated Universal Time(UTC) in order to keep a system's time of day close to the mean solar time. However, the Earth's rotation speed varies in response to climatic and geological events, and due to this, UTC leap seconds are irregularly spaced and unpredictable.

Severity:The severity depends on how far behind the customer in on updating RHEL and how sensitive their operations are to time adjustments. Some customers will just appreciate the news. Others running un-patched servers may experience kernel hangs.

Description:Another leap second will be added on December 31, 2016.Customers running RHEL servers that are completely patched and running NTP should not be concerned. (Applications should be fine, too, but it is always best to check with one's vendors.)Customers running completely patched RHEL servers but not NTP will find their systems' times off by 1 second. Customers will need to manually correct that.Customers running un-patched servers that cannot update their kernel, ntp and tzdata packages to at least the latest versions listed in the below document's "Known Issues" section's links should contact our Support Center for further assistance.

Monday, October 3, 2016

Meep (or MEEP) is a free finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation software package developed at MIT to model electromagnetic systems, along with our MPB eigenmode package. The latest official version is 1.3 and can be found at Download Page for Meep
Before you compile Meep 1.2.1, you need to first compile the libctl library. Compiling the libctl library is quite straightforward. After downloading,
Step 1: Compiling libctl-3.2.1

# Set CHARMBASE to the top level charm directory.
# The config script will override this setting if there is a directory
# called charm-6.7.0 or charm in the NAMD base directory.
CHARMBASE = /home/user1/NAMD/NAMD_2.11_Source/charm-6.7.0

Saturday, August 20, 2016

Since version 10.2 update 2 of Intel® MKL,
all components of
Direct Solver (Pardiso and DSS), Trust-Region (TR) Solver, Iterative
Sparse Solver (ISS) and GNU Multiple Precision (GMP) were moved
to standard MKL libraries.
So now solver ( e.g: mkl_solver.lib and mkl_solver_sequential.lib for IA32 ) libraries are
empty (for backward compatibility).
The list of deprecated libraries are the following: